SWANSONGS LS
Exhibitions

Swan Songs

Exhib­tion by Lucia Sellars.

Dates
04/11/22 – 06/11/22
Organisation
Region
Bristol
Opening Times
Sunday, 11:00 – 18:00
Mon–Thu, Closed
Friday, 18:00 – 21:30
Saturday, 11:00 – 18:00
We are born to die; yet, how many times do we die in a

lifetime? Small deaths surround us: a loss, an ending, a

heartbreak, a ‘Petit Mort’, a deep sleep, an accident, a

disenchantment, an achievement, a night. We go through

our lives in a journey between mountains and gullies,

where to reach either provokes the sensation of a small

death inside us, or a rebirth.


The title Swan Songs comes from the ancient belief that

swans sing a beautiful song just before their death for

they were silent all through their lifetime. What is death

though, but a rebirth into the unknown, like a river

meeting the vast sea and not knowing what lies ahead.

As Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedo: ‘… men, because of

their own fear of death, misrepresent the swans and say

that they sing for sorrow, in mourning for their own death.

They do not consider that no bird sings when it is hungry

or cold or has any other trouble; no, not even the

nightingale or the swallow or the hoopoe which are said

to sing in lamentation. I do not belief they sing for grief,

nor do the swans; but since they are Apollo’s birds, I

believe they have prophetic vision, and because they

have foreknowledge of the blessings in the other world

they sing and rejoice on that day more than ever before’.

Perhaps the beautiful swan song can be correlated to the

epiphany that extreme joy and sorrow bring: an

understanding, a letting go; either way a release. These

Swan Songs: these paintings before you represent some

of the small deaths and rebirths I have experienced,

these being either observed from the heightened clarity at

a mountain top or from the deep darkness of profound

gullies.


Lucia Sellars plays with text, fine art and moving image,

as well as being an environmental consultant and a quiet

observer. Early this year Beir Bua Press published her

poetry collection ‘The State of Moving’. Her video-poems

have been screened in the UK and internationally in

Greece, USA, Australia, Ireland and Russia. In April 2022

Lucia curated The Mythos Collective exhibition in Bristol.

You can see more of her work here:

www.luciasellars.org

@luciasellars1.